Gunmen kill two Saudi policeman

RIYADH: Unidentified gunmen killed two Saudi policemen in the eastern city of Dammam early on Tuesday, authorities in the region said.

The officers came under “heavy fire from an unknown source” as they parked their vehicle in a commercial area, the official SPA news agency quoted a police spokesman as saying.

The spokesman did not say who police suspected had carried out the shooting, the latest in a series of attacks on officers in mainly Shia areas of the oil-rich east of the kingdom.

Two policemen were killed in a similar attack in Dammam last month.

The Shia minority in Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia has long complained of discrimination and there has been sporadic unrest since the suppression of an uprising in neighbouring Bahrain sparked a wave of protests in 2011.

Saudi security forces have also come under attack by extremists linked to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group.

Meanwhile, one of 85 suspected Islamist militants on a Saudi wanted list sent to Interpol in February 2009 handed himself in to Saudi authorities, the interior ministry said.

Osama Ali Abdullah Damjan had contacted security services from abroad expressing a willingness to surrender and was flown home on Tuesday, a ministry statement published by SPA said, without specifying from which country.